Charlie Bird

5 King St. (212-235-7133)

“We just want to be your favorite neighborhood joint.” So says Charlie Bird, a new Italian-American restaurant off Sixth Avenue in SoHo, in a lengthy manifesto on its Web site. It also says that “Charlie Bird means New York,” and “Just like you, we dream of ditching work to sip rosé in the park and of hot summer nights all year long.” (Do New Yorkers, in fact, dream of hot summer nights all year long? Maybe the ones who don’t live in fourth-floor walkups do.)

What does it mean these days to be a neighborhood joint in downtown Manhattan, where on a recent Friday night a twenty-something waiting at the bar held a slate-colored Kelly bag, and the preponderance of four-inch heels suggests a general lack of familiarity with the subway? At Charlie Bird, it can mean some good things. For a start, there’s a real commitment to service: more places need to hand you a menu in return for your coat. There is a modest list of classic cocktails, not often seen (the Hemingway, the Blood and Sand). The food is comforting, with some ingenious additions, like uni in a creamy duck-egg spaghetti, and mint and pistachios in a lemony farro salad.

But Charlie Bird is expensive—paying less than a hundred dollars a person is difficult—and there are still more opportunities to spend money that feel ostentatious, like having truffles shaved on your pasta, for fifty dollars, or ordering a twenty-eight-dollar glass of wine. (Perhaps the prices are one reason that so many pairs of young women seem to be sharing a single piece of fish as their entrée.) On a weekend evening, you’ll need to lean in awfully close over the chicken-liver pâté appetizer, topped with walnuts and capers and radishes, or the pounded veal chop, which is golden and glistening with a crunch like K.F.C. That’s because it’s difficult to be heard above the newest Justin Timberlake album and also because of the jostling in the narrow bar area—a hazard of the extremely cool neighborhood joint welcoming walk-ins.

It’s not Charlie Bird’s fault that it is so popular with a moneyed crowd. There is a roast-chicken dish that encourages repeat visits: four or five pieces of chicken breast, sliced round, daubed with more of that chicken-liver pâté and charred-leek ricotta and served with “crispy bits,” which a waiter described as “dipping agents.” It sounds like something dreamt up at the Nabisco food labs but actually amounts to old-school fried croutons tossed in chicken jus. There’s also a veal-ragu rigatoni—crunchy, chewy, with more meat than tomato—that is warming and hearty. The question of how one place becomes a scene while another languishes, though, remains a mystery. Does Charlie Bird mean New York? Maybe, amid the truffle shavings and the suits with sneakers, it does. ♦